“Gautama the Buddha is supposed to have lived 2,500 years ago, and Jesus is supposed to have lived 2,000 years ago, but as far as I am concerned, both are a living reality. Once you create a certain volume of work with your life energies, it is permanent for all practical purposes and time does not destroy it. If you work with the physical body of flesh and blood, it has a limited life span. If you use your mind, the life span of that work is much longer. But if you work with your fundamental life energies, then the result is timeless.”
Sadhguru, Inner Engineering (Page 248)
“Sometimes people miss the missing link about the meaning of life: it’s you. It’s always been about you and what you’re about. If you’re about nothing, then life is about nothing. If you’re about love and truth, then life is about love and truth. If you’re about creating something great, then life is about that, and so on. Life is waiting for you to take the lead, but you’re staring into the sky waiting to be lead. So it’s a standoff, and the clock keeps on ticking.”
Les Matheson, Quora
“When you realize that all your material achievements are of value only in comparison with those who don’t have them, this is joy that springs from another’s deprivation. Can you really call this joy? Isn’t it actually a kind of sickness? It is time everyone addressed this. If you were alone on this planet, what would you want for yourself? Ask yourself this question and see where it takes you.”
Sadhguru, Inner Engineering (Page 221)
“Separateness is a myth. The content of both your physical and mental bodies has been gathered from the outside. They belong to you but they are not you. If you want to go the way your body is going currently, you should know that it is going straight to the grave. Similarly, whatever you know as the mind is a complex mess of all the stuff that it has been accumulating. The objectives of the mind are entirely self-created. They may seem to be fine right now, but they usually take you completely away from the process of life. So, if you go the way your mind goes, you should know you are heading toward an alternative psychological creation; it may be fascinating, stimulating, or even comforting for a length of time, but it bears no relation at all to existential reality.”
Sadhguru, Inner Engineering (Page 210)
“If you have to be in love, you should not be. The English expression ‘falling in love’ is very significant. You don’t climb in love, you don’t stand in love, you don’t fly in love, you fall in love. Something of you should fall or melt away to accommodate the other. There is a distinction between a transaction and a love affair. A love affair need not be with any particular person; you could be having a great love affair with life itself.”
Sadhguru, Inner Engineering (Page 200)
“There is really no such thing as conditional love and unconditional love. There are conditions and there is love. When you talk about love, it has to be unconditional. The moment there is a condition, it just amounts to a transaction. Maybe a convenient transaction, maybe a good arrangement, but that will not fulfill you or transport you to another dimension. It is just convenient. Love need not necessarily be convenient; most of the time it is not. It takes life. You have to invest yourself.”
Sadhguru, Inner Engineering (Page 192)
“The way you think is the way you feel, but thought and feeling seem to be different in your experience. Why is this so? Because thought has a certain clarity, a certain agility about it. Emotion is slower. Today, you think this is a very wonderful person and you have warm feelings about him. Suddenly, he does something that you don’t like, and you think he is horrible. Your thought tells you he is horrible, but your emotion cannot change immediately. It struggles. If it is sweet now, it cannot turn bitter at the very next moment. It takes time to turn around. It has a wider turning arc. Depending on the strength of your emotion, maybe it will take three days or three months or three years, but after some time, it will turn around.”
Sadhguru, Inner Engineering (Page 192)
“If you have a good seed and if you create the right atmosphere, it will sprout. Creating the right atmosphere of body and mind is the only work. You do not have to do anything else. No teachings of morality, no metaphysical discourses are needed. If your humanity is stirred, you are a beautiful human being.”
Sadhguru, Inner Engineering (Page 187)
“People will always find ways to subvert values, morals, and ethics. But when you are naturally joyful, you are naturally pleasant with the world around you. Spirituality does not mean moving away from life; it means becoming alive to the core, in the fullest possible way. With age, physical agility may diminish, but the level of joy and aliveness need not. If your level of joy and aliveness is declining, you are committing suicide in installments.”
Sadhguru, Inner Engineering (Page 186)
“Morality is worthwhile because it helps ensure social order, but it is capable of wreaking inner havoc. Since nobody can live by the morals prescribed by most religions, most of humanity lives in a state of perpetual guilt, shame, and fear. This is a tragically crippled existence. Humanity will also bring social order, but it requires no external enforcement whatsoever.”
Sadhguru, Inner Engineering (Page 186)
“Do you want to be a living being or a thinking being? Right now, ninety percent of the time, you are only thinking about life, not living it. Have you come into this world to experience life or to think about it? Your mental process is a very small happening compared to the life process, but right now it has become far more important. It is time for humanity to shift the significance to the life process once again. The need is an urgent one. Our lives depend on it.”
Sadhguru, Inner Engineering (Page 162)
“The most beautiful moments in your life—what you might consider moments of bliss, joy, ecstasy, or utter peace—were moments when you were not thinking about anything at all. You were just being. Even without your thoughts, existence is.”
Sadhguru, Inner Engineering (Page 150)
“Your body is just a loan from this planet. What you call ‘death’ is just Mother Earth reclaiming the loan that she offered to you. All life on this planet is just a recycle of the earth. You may think right now that you are going to your office, home, or football match, but as far as your body is concerned, it is going, moment by moment, straight toward the grave. Right now, you may have forgotten, but slowly, as time passes, it will become more apparent that this is the nature of the body.”
Sadhguru, Inner Engineering (Page 150)
“Everybody thinks their job is stressful. No job is stressful. There are many jobs that could present challenging situations. There could be nasty bosses, insecure colleagues, emergency rooms, impossible deadlines—or you might even find yourself in the middle of a war zone! But these are not inherently stressful. It is our compulsive reaction to the situations in which we are placed that causes stress. Stress is a certain level of internal friction. One can easily lubricate the inner mechanism with some amount of inner work and awareness. So, it is your inability to handle your own system that is stressing you out. On some level, you do not know how to handle your body, mind, and emotions; that is the problem.”
Sadhguru, Inner Engineering (Page 141)
“Our body and brain work at their best only when the stomach is empty. So be conscious of eating in such a way that within two and a half hours, your food moves out of the stomach, and within twelve to eighteen hours completely out of the system. With this simple awareness you will experience much more energy, agility, and alertness. These are the ingredients of a successful life, irrespective of what you choose to do with it.”
Sadhguru, Inner Engineering (Page 125)
“Logically, somebody who never put effort into anything should be the master of effortlessness. But it is not so. If you want to know effortlessness, you need to know effort. When you reach the peak of effort, you become effortless. Only a person who knows what it is to work understands rest. Paradoxically, those who are always resting know no rest; they only sink into dullness and lethargy. This is the way of life.”
Sadhguru, Inner Engineering (Page 105)
“When it comes to external realities, each human being is differently capable. What one does, the other may not be able to do. But when it comes to inner realities, all of us are equally capable. There is no guarantee that you will be able to sing, dance, climb a mountain, or make money, merely because you want to. But making your inner life blissful is something that everyone is capable of. It cannot be denied to you, if you are willing.”
Sadhguru, Inner Engineering (Page 79)
“Responsibility is not burdensome. Boundaries are burdensome. If you draw yourself a boundary, whether of ideology, caste, creed, race, or religion, you cannot move beyond it and you end up stuck for no reason at all. These boundaries only end up breeding fear, hatred, and anger. The bigger your boundary, the more burdensome it becomes. But if your responsibility is limitless, where’s the boundary? No boundary, no burden. This is the turnaround in human consciousness that needs to take place. Once this happens, it is not that the cosmos begins to happen your way. Instead, what you are becomes cosmic. This is not transcendence; this is homecoming.”
Sadhguru, Inner Engineering (Page 69)
“The whole effort of the spiritual process is to break the boundaries you have drawn for yourself and experience the immensity that you are. The aim is to unshackle yourself from the limited identity you have forged, as a result of your own ignorance, and live the way the Creator made you—utterly blissful and infinitely responsible.”
Sadhguru, Inner Engineering (Page 67)
“My ability to respond is limitless, but my ability to act is limited. I am one hundred percent responsible for everything I am and everything I am not, for my capacities and my incapacities, for my joys and my miseries. I am the one who determines the nature of my experience in this life and beyond. I am the maker of my life.”
Sadhguru, Inner Engineering (Page 66)